The Possession of Mr Cave

by Matt Haig

  The culprit sat there, fatly contented, making no attempt to disappear from the scene. 'Come on,' I said to you. 'Let's go to the bathroom. You need a plaster and some antiseptic.'

  I dressed your wound. A drop of blood fell into the stain your brother had made in the carpet, when he had sought to erode his birthmark with the bristles of his toothbrush. (There, you see: another echo.)

  'Thank you,' you said, as I gently pressed the plaster in place.

  These moments of tenderness were fading out, like fruits out of season, and I knew they were to be cherished.

  'I don't know what's got into that cat,' I said, although I already had my theories.

  Of course, it was the incident a mere ten minutes later that really sounded the alarm bells. Your desperate cry reached me while I was on the telephone, having a late conversation with a furniture supplier. The moment I heard it I stood up and ran and saw you lying at the bottom of the stairs. Your mother and Reuben had died like this, I thought. Died suddenly, falling. And now it was your turn. There was a pattern to it, an inevitability, that made me think the worst.

  At first you were silent, and didn't move. The terror must have leaked into my voice. 'Bryony?'

  You lifted your head, saw me standing high above you, and began to whimper in pain.

  'My poor girl,' I said. 'My poor darling Petal.'

  I ran down to you. I helped you sit up. I kissed your forehead.

  'Can you stand up?'

  In your shock you were a child again. 'I don't know,' you said.

  'Let's try. There. See. You're all right, you're all right.'

  'My wrist,' you said. 'It's killing.'

  'I think we should take you to the hospital.'

  In the car you told me what had happened. You had been running down to get yourself a drink, a fruit juice, and you had tripped over Higgins. He had shot out from nowhere and caught your foot. You were worried you might have hurt him too but, as you spoke, I had other concerns.

  Was it possible that something had taken hold of Higgins? A malevolent visitation? No, it was not possible. And yet, hadn't such a thing happened to me? And hadn't it happened to Turpin, also? If your brother was trying to hurt you he knew he would have had to fight hard against my love, so maybe he sought softer targets to attack you directly. Quiet, peaceful animal souls, open and undefended.

  I know what you are thinking.

  I had lost hold of all rationality.

  Well, yes, you are right. Yet I must tell you I had lost faith in rationality the day I stared out of that upstairs window and saw your brother hanging from that godforsaken lamp post, waiting to drop.

  No, long before. Study history and you will see there is nothing rational in this world. Every civilisation, from those of the ancients to our own, has sought ways of explaining our existence. Gods have come and gone, beliefs and ideologies have been fought on blood-drenched battlefields, and we are still trapped inside the same mysterious lives. All of us, like Socrates, know nothing except the fact of our ignorance. I could have been hallucinating that night I had followed Turpin and found Reuben's ghost. I could have imagined your brother had found a way inside my mind, at that Cockpit. But who could tell me for certain? What do we have to trust but our own minds? There is no truth in this world, Bryony, only interpretation. We still do not know where precisely our souls exist, when we have gone, and so we know nothing. Such were my rambling thoughts in that old rambling Volvo, thoughts broken by your nervous command. 'Dad? Slow down. We're here. Accident and Emergency.'

  We waited hours, didn't we?

  Hours spent staring up at the rolling news as you held your wrist. Hours among the injury-prone inhabitants of our lower society. Do you remember that drunk who sat opposite us, the one with the smashed-up face, the one who kept asking us if we had seen a chap called Melvyn? Eventually you were called, by the undead administrator behind the desk. The Indian doctor said you had a Colles' fracture and wrapped your wrist in white cotton. I thought of Pablo Casals and the boulder that had smashed his hand and stopped him playing. That was what Reuben wanted, I realised. He had watched you at the concert and grown jealous. Yes, I was convinced of it.

  'My daughter plays the cello,' I said. 'Will she be able to play again?'

  'Oh yes, definitely,' said the doctor. 'A month or so and it should be fine. It is quite a mild fracture.'

  He smiled at you and you smiled back. He was young and handsome, that doctor, and I sensed his interest and gentle attention was not solely professional. 'It could have been a lot worse,' he said, and I might have seen him give you a wink.

  A lot worse. The phrase was a warning, I realised that. The doctor was merely a talking vessel, a messenger of fate. I had to listen to him, despite his unsavoury attraction to my fifteen-year- old daughter. I had to listen and act accordingly. You were all I had left, a glowing candle of last hope, and I was prepared to do anything – anything at all – to protect the flame.

  Which all leads me to the following confession:

  Higgins never ran away. I was never surprised that he did not come home for his supper, or reappear in his basket the following evening. When I told you and Cynthia that I hadn't the faintest clue where he had got to I was lying. I knew exactly where he was but concealed the knowledge from you even as you began to cry.

  I must confess your tears surprised me, you could have died tripping over that cat. Still, I offered my reassurances that he would return.

  Now, my Petal, for the truth.

  There was a woman from Knaresborough I discovered in the telephone book. She offered her home to unwanted cats. I phoned her up and travelled there while you were at school. I locked 'Higgins' in his transparent travel basket and placed him on the floor by the passenger seat so he couldn't see where he was going.

  I drove fast, feeling those large green eyes gazing up at me the whole journey.

  'I'm sorry, Higgins, if this is all a mistake, but you must understand that I have to protect Bryony. I simply cannot risk another incident. If something is . . . if there is . . . if Reuben is . . .'

  Your brother had wanted a dog, hadn't he? He had never wanted a cat. 'Listen, all I'm saying is that –' A horn blasted a warning somewhere behind and I looked out of the windscreen to see a Japanese car sloping out onto the motorway. I swerved into the middle lane and narrowly avoided clips of my mangled corpse making the travel news.

  I glanced again at the cat, to receive a look of malevolent and all-knowing godliness that sent a shiver through me. I said no more, fixed my eyes on the road ahead, and reached Knaresborough as quickly as I could.

  The cat lady was a balding, flush-cheeked widow named Mrs Janice Cobb. Her meaty hand grasped his neck and held him at face height. 'Oh yes, he looks the villain, doesn't he?' she said, as she stared into his stretched-back eyes. And then she repeated it, quieter, in parentheses. '(He looks the villain.)'

  Her house choked me with its dusty air and urinary odours. I remember noticing, amid the thousand cats, some of the most vulgar items of porcelain I had ever seen. Felines sculpted in human poses, with top hats and bonnets. Higgins jumped up to join them on the shelf.

  'Down off there, (down off there,)' said Mrs Cobb, rather sternly. She landed him on that wretched carpet and he stared at me with incomprehension. He was back to Higgins again, a cautious old he-cat, reluctant to make new friends. I felt so cruel, leaving him there.

  'Mrs Cobb,' I said, ready to change my mind.

  'Yes? (Yes?)' A ginger mog was playing parrot on her shoulder. 'I love you too, Angus. Yes, Mummy loves you. (Mummy loves you.)'

  'Nothing,' I said. 'It was nothing.'

  I closed my eyes and fought back my guilt.

  'Goodbye, Higgins. Be good.'

  It was that night when I experienced another blackout. I had been unable to sleep. My mouth had been feeling inexplicably dry, which had caused an annoying and rather compulsive need to keep swallowing. On top of that, I kept seeing Denny's brutish face exactly as it h
ad been in the assembly hall. It wouldn't go away. It was there, in my mind, complete with those famished eyes.

  I got out of bed, ran myself a glass of water, and then went to the living room to find a book to read. I was about to pick out Stevenson's Kidnapped, which I had devoured as a boy but hadn't looked at since, when I caught sight of the family albums. Replacement images, I thought, to help elbow Denny's face back into the darkness.

  I pulled one out and sat down, putting the glass on the table. The very first image made me cry. It was your mother, fresh out of hospital, with a baby in each arm. Her tired, joyous smile cutting straight through time as she looked out from the photograph.

  'Oh, Helen, if only you were here.'

  I kept flicking, and saw all those pictures of you together. The mother and her twins. On the last page there was one of the four of us. Cynthia must have taken it. You and your brother, side by side in your cots. If Reuben hadn't been crying then you would have looked identical. Wrapped up in your cream blankets like two butter beans. Your mother and I leaning over, with happy and unknowing smiles.

  I pulled out another album, which had a year's break halfway through, the break caused by your mother's death. After she had died I saw little in life I wanted to record or put down for posterity. Eventually I got back on track, but never with the same frequency as when you had been babies. I went through the next album, and the next, and the next, going through your life history in photographs. Your look of amazement at the birthday cake Cynthia made you when you were four. Can you remember it, with the toy horse and the stables made of chocolate matchsticks? There was a picture of you with your Handwerck doll, Angelica, cradled in your arms. Another had you holding Cynthia's hand on the beach at Whitby. A long-forgotten Sunday excursion. Gradually, as I kept flicking through the pages, I noticed his gradual disappearance. As a toddler he was often by your side, at the forefront of the shot, but as you grew up and gained independence the bias towards you was unmistakable. He would be caught, running in the background. A distant, blue-duffel smudge. Or, later on, as you both passed double figures, he wasn't there at all. It was always you playing your recorder, or your violin, or your cello. Or at a horse event leaning over Turpin as you successfully made it over a jump. There was a couple of him looking miserable in the yard, standing by his bicycle, but hardly anything more.

  I found an old school photograph, loose amid the others.

  You were ten years old, wearing a dress bought from a hypermarket outside Aix-en-Provence the summer before. It had a high collar, with navy and white vertical stripes. Your hair was bobbed in the style of a Franciscan monk from the Middle Ages, your unpierced earlobes peeping out from underneath.

  Your smile, your complexion (lily white except for the brush of pink on your cheeks), the eyes that I translated as happy, eager, unknowing. Sacred. The school photographer as Dutch master. In that picture, against the anonymous grey-blue background, you seemed outside of this world, somewhere special, beyond touch.

  One whole album was devoted to your appearance at a York Drama and Music Festival. As I stared at a photograph of you frowning thoughtfully as you studied the sheet music, I had the most dreadful shock. It began to move. You, inside the photograph, your hand moving the bow in those slow, considered strokes.

  'No,' I said. 'No, it's an illusion.'

  Suddenly, inside the photograph, it was me. My side profile, staring with devotion in that same assembly hall. I was looking at myself from below, from Reuben's height in the next chair along. Then those strange sensations again. The tingles in my cerebellum. Those dancing sparks from invisible fires. I sipped my water but it was too late. The black veil was falling over my eyes and I could hardly see. Flies buzzed and crowded nearer.

  'Come on, Terence, you're stronger than him. Try to pull yourself together.'

  By the time I had finished the sentence I was in the park, still in my pyjamas. There was a plastic bottle in my hand. The ammonia bottle. Tipping it upside down I realised, to my ascending dread, that it was already empty.

  I stepped forward, one of my bare feet pressing down on a twig. With the aid of the yellow glow from Reuben's distant street lamp I saw a black shape, scorched into the grass.

  The warmth of the ground reached me as I leaned in for a closer inspection. An oval, rising to a thin point. Like a giant teardrop. I caught the faintest smell of maple.

  'Oh no,' I whispered, my words silent in the night wind. 'What have we done?'

  I was cooking our porridge and listening to the radio when you came into the kitchen, fiddling with your bandage. 'My cello,' you said. 'It's not there.'

  'What?'

  You said it again, shaking it out of your mouth. 'My cello. It's not there.'

  'What do you mean it's not there?'

  'It's not in my room. It's not anywhere.'

  I tried my hardest not to cry. I couldn't believe it. Your cello! I thought of the scorched black teardrop in the park, and prayed you would never see it and make the connection. What was happening? Why was he doing this? Why did he want the treasured icons of the old you, the authentic Bryony, to disappear?

  'Oh,' I said, my voice sounding too frail, too weak, to sound truly convincing. 'Oh, I don't know where it is. How bizarre. We'll have to buy you a new one. I'll buy you a new one. Don't worry, by the time your wrist gets better we'll have got you a new one. A better one. A Strad. We'll go to Manchester and you can choose whatever you want.'

  'I don't want a new one,' you said, as suspicion crept into your voice. 'Where is it? It was in my room and now it's gone. That's beyond bizarre.'

  Indeed it was. But what else could I do? Blame it on intruders, and risk getting the police involved?

  'How would I have any idea where it is? Seriously, Bryony, why would I have hidden your cello? I adore it when you play.'

  I was staring down into the porridge, so I have no facial expression of yours to try and recall. I imagine it as sitting somewhere between fury and confusion.

  You said no more. You walked out of the room and left me standing there, stirring porridge that was already burnt, as a man on the radio talked about the long slow death of the sun.

  Oh yes, something else. Mrs Weeks came into the shop, with the apparent purpose of enquiring after George's performance the previous Thursday. She looked immaculate, as always. Neat, tucked-in, straight-bobbed, but there was something troubled about her. She nodded and twitched and clung to her wicker basket as I gave her the report. I told her that he had proved himself, despite my doubts, to be a remarkably competent assistant, one well informed on a range of appropriate subjects.

  'You have worked a miracle, Mrs Weeks,' I concluded. 'You have restored the old George rather perfectly. Tell me, what's your secret?'

  She kept on nodding, into the silence, as though I was still talking. Her eyes were staring in my direction but seemed to be looking through me, rather than at me, as though there was another Terence she was listening to, a metre behind this one.

  'Someone attacked Stuart,' she said.

  'Stuart?'

  She closed her eyes and swallowed. 'George's father. He was walking home. It was outside his new place. Someone attacked him, from out of nowhere.'

  A fear ran through me. I remembered seeing Mr Weeks and the tourists on their way to Clifford's Tower. I remembered his angry voice in my ear and his unmoving mouth, concealed in his beard, as I had stood inside that doorway.

  'Oh,' I said, in a fragile voice. 'Oh . . . how terrible. I . . . he . . . is he all . . .'

  'Yes. He was unconscious for hours, and we spent a most dreadful night, but he is all right. The doctors say he is very fortunate to have made such a recovery after such a nasty injury.'

  I wondered why she had decided to come out of her way to tell me this information. (Of course, antique sellers are third only to priests and psychotherapists as useful listeners. I believe it has to do with the shop itself, and all those old items that have silently witnessed so much over the centu
ries. Yet Mrs Weeks was not the type to burden you with her problems for no reason, no matter how tempted she may have been. She normally held onto them with the same tight grip as she now held onto her basket.)

  The thought worried me, and pushed me towards a question. 'Who on earth would do such a thing? Have the police caught whoever did this?'

  Mrs Weeks gave a quick shake of her head and I felt a relief I tried to ignore. 'No. He didn't see anything. The police say it's very unlikely that they'll be able to find the attacker. Given the time and place and the fact there were no witnesses, and no camera footage. Oh, Mr Cave, I feel so responsible.'

  Her words echoed my fears. 'Responsible?'

  She took a deep breath, a sigh in reverse, before trying to shed her guilt. 'You see, he had wanted to stay with us but I had insisted, for George's sake mainly, that he rethink his decision and leave. If he had been on his way back to us it would never have happened.'

  'Oh, I see,' I said. 'Right. Well, don't be too severe on yourself. You couldn't have known what was going to happen, could you? The main thing is that he is going to be all right, isn't it? Mrs Weeks?'

  Her face crumpled in front of me, like a fast-ageing fruit, and before I knew it she was sobbing.

  'Oh, Mrs Weeks, Mrs Weeks, Mrs Weeks . . .' I came out from behind my counter and held her in my arms, the wicker basket positioned awkwardly between us.

  'I feel so ridiculous,' she said, between sobs. 'After all, you've been through so much worse this year.'

  I looked over her shoulder at Cynthia's window display. At the tableau of nude figurines on the dressing table and I felt a sudden sense of shame. Alongside the sympathy I was feeling for this poor woman, I was also experiencing something else.

  Oh, it is so strange. I can express to you all manner of dreadful deeds yet when it comes to that yearning emotion I felt as a result of this encounter, I feel the urge to flee from any honest account. But I know I must be honest about it. I must. I must tell you that as well as a father I was a man like many others, a man who knew that the still shores of his romantic self were susceptible to waves of longing at any moment.